John Rentoul

John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning.
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Denis Healey came to speak at the Mile End Group last night – the video is here. He was on characteristic form, presented by Peter (Professor the Lord) Hennessy and William Keegan (right), to an audience that included Nigel Lawson, David Owen, Joel Barnett, David Miliband, Andrew Adonis and mandarins from Healey’s time at the [...]

Fabulous question for number 493 for my collection of those to which the answer is No. Asked by – you know – a newspaper. With a “How Journalism Works” second award for the use of “set to”.
Thank you to PaulH61.

I have now read and enjoyed Ed Miliband’s favourite book, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side, and it is every bit as good as my correspondent said it was. I don’t know how good the film, starring Sandra Bullock, is, but it is a made-for-movies story. The fairytale of Michael Oher, a successful American footballer from [...]

Twitter is good, partly because it is so simple. As I have said before, at rather more than 140 characters’ length. So why do they make a new version that is more complicated? And why do they force people off the old version by repeatedly asking anyone left on it question number 492 in my [...]

Rob Marchant on what’s wrong with the signature sound bite of Ed Miliband’s recent speeches and articles:
The awkward truth is that there is no progressive majority, at least, not in the sense being proposed. A combination of the left wing of the Lib Dems and our own current political direction would not be the same as [...]

I don’t read Henry Porter, but I know a man who does. Norman Geras, in fact. Whose journey into Didmagnacartadieinvainland yields this gem of idiocy on the Chilcot inquiry:
As with the other inquiries into Iraq, the British public has been deprived of proper satisfaction. We don’t need a show trial, just a sense that penitence [...]

Unusually, an anonymous commenter, rms3, has made a contribution to the debate about Iraq from an anti-war position that is clear, factual, well argued and reasonable. For the benefit of readers who have better things to do with their time than trawl through the bottom-dwelling creatures that dominate the comments, I reproduce this response to [...]

Nothing new in Tony Blair’s appearance at the Chilcot inquiry on Friday, but three additions to The Dictionary of Iraq War Quotations. All of them first picked up by Paul Waugh, proving that his journalistic sharpness has not been blunted by his move to Politics Home.
For those of my colleagues in the London-Based Liberal Media [...]

High quality satire from the Mail on Sunday today. Simon Walters reports that a former Cabinet Secretary who served under Tony Blair,* “speaking on condition of anonymity”, said it was “unfair” to keep the Blair-Bush memos secret.
I have tried to explain the constitutional principle of confidentiality as it applies to communications between the British prime minister [...]